Lifeboat Foundation

The two materials, the researchers found, can be combined with water to make a supercapacitor — an alternative to batteries — that could provide storage of electrical energy. As an example, the MIT researchers who developed the system say that their supercapacitor could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day’s worth of energy while adding little (or no) to the cost of the foundation and still providing the needed structural strength. The researchers also envision a concrete roadway that could provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel over that road.

The simple but innovative technology is described this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT professors Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic, and Yang-Shao Horn, and four others at MIT and at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

MIT engineers created a carbon-cement supercapacitor that can store large amounts of energy. Made of just cement, water, and carbon black, the device could form the basis for inexpensive systems that store intermittently renewable energy, such as solar or wind energy.

Great Wall Motor will use Baidu’s Ernie 3.5 foundational language model which rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT4.

Marking the entry of AI systems into mass-market cars, Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor (GWM) is set to integrate Baidu’s ChatGPT-like AI system, which enables conversation between driver and car.

According to South China Morning Post (SCMP). GMW has partnered with technology firm Baidu to produce automobiles integrated with the latter’s chatbot tool, Ernie Bot, bolstering a push to make cars more intelligent and user-friendly.

Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries power smartphones, electric vehicles and storage for solar and wind energy, among other technologies.

They descend from another technology, the lithium-metal battery, that hasn’t been developed or adopted as broadly. There’s a reason for that: While lithium-metal batteries have the potential to hold about double the energy that lithium-ion batteries can, they also present a far greater risk of catching fire or even exploding.

Now, a study by members of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA reveals a fundamental discovery that could lead to safer lithium-metal batteries that outperform today’s lithium-ion batteries. The research was published today in the journal Nature.

Elon Musk took over control of the company at a crucial moment.

Scientists at Purdue University are propelling the future of robotics and autonomous systems forward with their patent-pending method that improves typical machine vision and perception.

Zubin Jacob, the Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and research scientist Fanglin Bao have developed HADAR, or heat-assisted detection and ranging. Their research was featured on the cover of the July 26 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Jacob said it is expected that one in 10 vehicles will be automated and that there will be 20 million robot helpers that serve people by 2030.

Elon Musk says Tesla is now working on the “final piece of the Full Self-Driving (FSD) AI puzzle,” and apparently that is “vehicle control.”

Despite his best efforts to stop making predictions about self-driving, the CEO has recently still predicted that Tesla would achieve full autonomy by the end of the year.

For many of us who use Tesla’s FSD Beta regularly, it is hard to imagine that Tesla can make the jump from the current state to a level 4 or 5 of autonomy where the automaker would take responsibility for the system and enable drivers to use it without monitoring in just a few months.

The day is fast approaching when generative AI won’t only write and create images in a convincingly human-like style, but compose music and sounds that pass for a professional’s work, too. This morning, Meta announced AudioCraft, a framework to generate what it describes as “high-quality,” “realistic” audio and music from short text descriptions, or prompts. It’s not Meta’s first foray into audio generation — the tech giant open sourced an AI-powered music generator, MusicGen, in June — but Meta claims that it’s made advances that vastly improve the quality of AI-generated sounds, such as dogs barking, cars honking and footsteps on a wooden floor.

In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Meta… More.

What specific changes can we expect in the exterior and interior of the 2024 Tesla Model Y Juniper? When exactly will the Model Y refresh be released? Will there be any improvements in the battery and technology of the Model Y?

As the electric vehicle market continues to thrive, Tesla remains at the top of the EV ladder with its models staying in the top selling charts. Among its impressive lineup, the Model Y stands out as a tough rival shaping the whole EV market in its favor.

With the upcoming release of the 2024 Tesla Model Y Project Juniper and Model 3 Project Highland, as we discussed in our recent posts, Tesla is aiming to redefine the electric SUV segment even further. This highly anticipated refresh promises exciting changes to both the interior and exterior of the popular Model Y.

MIT researchers have discovered that when you mix cement and carbon black with water, the resulting concrete self-assembles into an energy-storing supercapacitor that can put out enough juice to power a home or fast-charge electric cars.

We’ve written before about the idea of using concrete for energy storage – back in 2021, a team from the Chalmers University of Technology showed how useful amounts of electrical energy could be stored in concrete poured around carbon fiber mesh electrodes, with mixed-in carbon fibers to add conductivity.

MIT’s discovery appears to take things to the next level, since it does away with the need to lay mesh electrodes into the concrete, and instead allows the carbon black to form its own connected electrode structures as part of the curing process.